Bill Keller’s per-foreign policy debate column is good for a laugh.  In ostensible purpose of the column is to give advice to Romney about what he should talk about in tonight’s debate.  Of course, before giving that advice, Keller has this to say

I’d describe myself as a qualified admirer of President Obama’s foreign policy. It is reactive and rarely inspiring, but judicious and flexible. Romney shows little instinct for a dangerously complex world. But in the spirit of nonpartisanship, here’s my advice to the challenger.

Keller then goes on to tell Romney to adopt and agree with all of Obama’s foreign policy.  How anyone can be an admirer of a foreign policy where the world’s superpower leads from behind, dithers on Iran, concedes to Russia, is paralyzed on Syria and has lost any credibility in Libya is beyond me.  The only point in Keller’s piece I can get behind is his call to stop bashing China for currency manipulation.  Keller is right – it is an easy line to get applause on (and Obama was no less enthusiastic about going after China in the previous debate), but easy applause does not mean good policy.  China should be viewed as a strategic rival – it is building up its military, has revisionist aims and, economically, is very much at fault for an atmosphere that breeds the theft of U.S. intellectual property – but that doesn’t mean that currency manipulation is our main problem.  In fact, by keeping the currency weak it makes lots of goods cheaper for Americans to buy.

Roger Cohen has a piece in the Times the other day that is hopelessly confused from beginning to end, starting with the assertion that “China is a status quo power.”  The basis of this claim is “It [China] preaches dialogue, noninterference and the sanctity of national sovereignty because it does not want major global disruptions to its pursuit of the economic growth essential to political stability and full development by midcentury.”  That argument flies in the face of reality – China is investing in a blue water navy it has never had before (its first aircraft carrier is beginning to undergo evaluation testing), it is fighting with Japan about the Senkaku Islands and it has invested heavily in “anti-access’ weapons (mines and cruise missiles) that are designed to prevent U.S. dominance in the region.  Cohen misunderstands what China means when it calls for “noninterference.”  What China is saying (and it is not at all veiled) is that the United States should not interfere in Asia (recently with respect to the Senkaku dispute), not that all powers in the region and the world should refrain from wielding influence over others.

Later, in an attempt to paint Romney as backwards, Cohen states that “Russia is also a status quo power — the status quo of 30 years ago” and “[a]s for Mitt Romney, he belongs to Putin’s school of foreign policy.”  Here Cohen, in a truly stunning misuse of language, has conflated antonyms.  Status quo implies continuation of the present, but here Cohen has misconstrued it to mean a return to a past strategic relationship.  Moreover, not only does Cohen misuse the language, he does so in a way which reveals he, not Romney, is the one mired in the past.  If we are to take Cohen’s logic to its conclusion, it would mean that anytime a new strategic relationship between two parties emerges where those parties previously had a relationship of a similar nature – no matter how long ago and what the circumstances –  that they are returning to the “status quo.”  Under Cohen’s logic, when England and France were at war in World War II it was a return to the status quo of World War I, which in turn was a return to the status quo of the Napoleonic wars.  Clearly that is false – different actors, circumstances and motives were at play in each of the disputes.  In the extant example, the criticism of Russia under Putin and its possible strategic threat to the United States is grounded in an entirely different analysis than that of the Cold War.  It is only someone who superficially looks at the surface of the issue (and the names of the participants) who could conclude that the present dynamic is analogous to the Cold War.